moment at which the esthetic problem presents itself, when attention is diverted from the excitement of the clothes as such, to the question of what one looks like (not just what one feels like); the realization that in this compulsion to dress there lurked the embryo of another personality which required its gestation before birth; and the birth itself, the femme name, and the recognition of the new self by the old self. I consider that I am at a potentially dramatic moment. I have recently married for the second time; I have only recently become a subscriber to TVia and a member of FPE. Like so many, my years of dressing were spent alone physically and psychologically. So my own awareness of my FP condition provokes my opening question: and what is for me its inevit- able follow-up; where do I think I am going and where am I actually going? Like all good sceptics I believe I won't know until I get there. I might do better by asking: where am I? Who is that woman in the mirror? She has now come out into the open; she is accepted by a GG; she feels she is ready for an FP social life; she now feels she is her own as well as her brother's creation and will in the future be in part a GG's creation too. Art is subsequent to recognition, for to see yourself as a woman is to accept the necessity of looking as well as you possibly can. Like all games, you can only play satisfactorily by sticking to the letter of the rules; in FPia the spirit isn't enough, it is the letter that giveth life.

Our capacity for self-deception is acknowledged and limitless: but it is only the reverse side of our imagination; we are forever trapped in a fantasy we seek to make reality, and whatever level of FP development we reach we still operate in a framework of fantasy. Fantasy is itself real in that it exists: I believe, therefore I am; I imagine, therefore I am; I desire, therefore I am. Our fantasy is both pathetic and heroic: it is the human dignity of refusing to surrender to the impossible, of plucking a painful victory out of a context of disaster. We cannot be women, but we can become Femme-Personators; in that is our victory, the only one we can win, and only by winning it can we sign a peace treaty. We adjust and we compromise. To me that means take the two and make them one. If acceptance is our slogan we accept that it means that we have to accept ourselves before we can expect other to accept us. Here the first burden is that on my brother. He has to accept that I am with him for life. However femmicidal he may at times feel, whatever strategies he may employ against me, he has no chance of eliminating me (except at a price which would be virtually suicidal to him). The twin sister initially appears as a liability, even a threat: both must combine to bring strength out of weakness, to turn vulnerability into assurance and confidence. And I do not write as if there is ever a stable point, an equilibrium which once achieved will maintain itself. I don't believe this: there will always be

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